Cardinals' Courts in Sixteenth-Century Rome

Abstract

The subject of cardinals' courts during the early modem period is one historians have long neglected. In terms of sheer numbers, however, that social configuration had a notable importance: the members of the twenty-one courts listed in the census of 1526-27, for instance, together with the personnel of the papal court, accounted for 7 percent of the adult population of Rome. Although decline set in, the overall number of courtiers remained high for most of the seventeenth century. 1 The Italian historiographic tradition on court civilization, formed in the Risorgimento, seems to have persisted longer in its negative view of papal and cardinals' courts than of secular courts. For De Sanctis, one of the major figures in that tradition, court civilization was the expression of a Catholicimperial culture imbued with absolutism and dogmas representing everything that was repugnant to the secular, libertarian, anticlerical spirit of Risorgimento culture.2 As the cradle of that civilization and a model for the